owen Miller
the
idea of stagnation in Korean
historiography
from fukuda Tokuzo To The New righT¯
0] IntroductIon
The idea of a stagnant past giving rise to a
backward present is by no means unique to the study of Korean history. This
idea was almost universal in the approach of colonizing European nations to the
subjects of their imperial domination, from at least the late eighteenth
century onward. Perry Anderson has given an excellent overview of
the genesis and development of the ideas of ‘Asiatic’ stagnation and despotism
as employed by thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Bacon, Montesquieu, Hegel,
John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. He has also analysed the way in which Marx and
Engels absorbed many of these ideas in the mid-nineteenth century in the
formation of their views on Asia, giving some parts of Marxist theory a
distinctly ‘Orientalist’ slant.1 The concept of stagnation itself
can be understood as an inversion of the concept of linear progress, invented
in the course of the most recent world-historical transition from
pre-capitalist to capitalist societies. This dichotomy between past and future
was something novel, replacing the prevailing cyclical or messianic conceptions
of time. As Shlomo Sand has written recently,
The rupture caused by
modernization detached humanity from its recent past. The mobility created by
industrialization and urbanization shattered not only the rigid social ladder
but also the traditional, cyclic continuity between past, present and future.2
In the twentieth century the
concepts of progress and stagnation became deeply embedded in the consciousness
of people everywhere, but perhaps especially so in the minds of those living in
the late developing countries like (South) Korea, who are constantly reminded
of the need to ‘catch up’ or to eliminate any vestiges of the ‘stagnant’ past.
However, in the academic
world the concept of stagnation cannot be reduced simply to a matter of
Eurocentric ideology or a tool of imperialism, since it often forms a part of
serious scholarly attempts to analyse the history of particular countries and
reflects, however imperfectly, the real geographical and temporal unevenness of
human historical development. When it comes to the politically ambiguous nature
of the concept of stagnation, Korea is a case in point. In the historiography
of Korea, stagnation was first used as a justification for Japanese colonialism
and later adopted by Marxists seeking revolutionary social transformation; the
concept is still today causing controversy among Korean historians who line up
on either side of the debate over ‘internal development’ versus ‘colonial
modernity.’
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1 Perry anderson,
Lineages of the Absolutist State (London:
Verso, 1979), pp. 462-483. For further discussions of
eurocentrism and the origins of the eurocentric view of history see samir
amin, Eurocentrism (London: Zed
Books, 1989); eric Wolf, Europe and the
People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
2 shlomo sand, The Invention of the Jewish People
(London: Verso, 2009), pp. 62-3.
Korean
Histories 2.1 2010
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This article will
introduce themes that will be developed further in an upcoming monograph-length
study of Marxist historiography in Korea and East Asia. The planned monograph
will address the recurring dichotomies of stagnation/progress and particular/universal
in the East
Asian
historical debates of the twentieth century. As part of that broader project,
this article will focus on how the concept of stagnation or backwardness has
been applied to Korean history, from the beginning of the twentieth century up
until the present day, looking at three scholars who have worked within this
paradigm.3 We will begin with the Japanese economist Fukuda Tokuzō 福田德三 in the early years of the twentieth
century, then look at the mid-century work of Korean Marxist historian Chŏn Sŏktam
全錫談, before concluding with an
overview of some of the ideas of Rhee Younghoon 李榮薰,
the contemporary Seoul National University economic historian.
Although previous
scholarship has paid attention to stagnation theory, this attention has generally
consisted of a rather formulaic denunciation of Japanese colonial
historiography. In this scheme, stagnation theory is simply one element of
Japanese colonial domination that had to be overcome by the theories of
internal development developed by North and South Korean scholars in the
post-liberation period. Whatever the intrinsic problems of stagnation theory
itself, this article aims to show that such an approach to the concept Fukuda tokuzō is
far too simplistic. The three scholars examined here have offered quite
different conceptions of stagnation in Korean history and differing
explanations of its causes. The political and historical contexts in which they
have approached the problem of stagnation have varied greatly and their
political motivations for applying the concept have occupied opposite ends of
the spectrum, stretching from revolutionary socialism to conservative
neoliberalism and colonial apologism. Contrary to the general assumption of
nationalist historians in Korea that stagnation theory was simply a tool of
colonial ideology that had to be ‘overcome’ in the postcolonial era, this
article will show that the politics of stagnation are more complex and can only
be transcended with a more fundamental re-evaluation of the progress/stagnation
dichotomy.
1] FuKuda toKuzo’s stagnatIon
thEory¯
The first figure that
looms large in the history of stagnation theory in Korea is that of the
Japanese economic thinker Fukuda Tokuzō (1874-1930). Fukuda was born in Tokyo
in 1874 and after a precocious academic career at Hitotsubashi University (then
called Tokyo Higher Commercial School 東京高等商業学校), he went in 1898 to study for a
doctorate in Germany under Karl Bücher and Lujo Brentano, both scholars of the
German
Historical School of
Economics.4
In Japan, Fukuda is known as
an anti-Marxist liberal economic thinker who was keenly interested in social
policy and sought to theorize ‘welfare economics.’ In Korea, though, Fukuda is
known almost exclusively as the author of the original stagnation theory that would
become one of the perennial ideological props of Japanese colonial rule on the
peninsula. Shortly after receiving his doctorate in Germany and returning to
Japan in 1901, Fukuda Tokuzō visited
Korea. It was this visit that inspired
the 1904 essay that
has given Fukuda such an infamous role in Korean historiography, entitled “The
economic organizations and economic units of Korea” (“Kankoku
no keizai soshiki to
keizai tani” 韓國の經濟組織と經濟單位).5
Here he made an explicit contrast between the normal, developmental path of
Japan which, in his doctoral thesis of four years earlier, he had described as
similar to that of Germany, and the abnormal development of
Korea.6
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3 While i do not
argue that these three scholars exhaust the history of stagnation theory in
Korea, they are, i believe, representative of the three distinct forms that
stagnation theory has taken over the last century.
4 For more on the
life and ideas of Fukuda tokuzō, see inoue takutoshi and Yagi Kiichiro, “two
inquirers on the Divide: tokuzo Fukuda and Hajime Kawakami,” http://www.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yagi/FUkkawiy.html
(accessed 8/7/2010); tessa Morris-suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (London: routledge, 1989).
5 Fukuda tokuzō,
“Kankoku no keizai soshiki to keizai tani.”
6 Yi Ch’ŏlsŏng,
“shingminji shigi yŏksa inshik-kwa yŏksa sŏsul,” Han’guksa 23 (seoul: Han’gilsa, 1994): pp. 150-151.
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For Fukuda one of the main
symptoms of Korea’s backwardness that he had observed during his visit was the
underdevelopment of private ownership in land. Accord-
ing to him even state or royal ownership of
land was essentially a fiction, and the yangban
兩班 ruling
class had social privileges rather than landed estates. Another sign of
backwardness could be found in human relationships, where relations of
obedience between commoners and yangban prevailed
and relations between free individuals were lacking. Likewise, in the Korean
villages the clan system predominated, meaning that there was no concept of the
individual, no independent small family unit and little or no social
differentiation.7 It is interesting to note that these symptoms of
backwardness can be found among the main features of Asiatic societies
identified by European Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, Smith and
Hegel.8
Fukuda had adopted Karl
Bücher’s theory of developmental stages in economic history and now tried to
apply this scheme to Korea’s economic history. In fact, Fukuda’s essay on Korea
is significant due to the fact that it introduced the concept of economic
stages to Korean history for the first time, a mode of analysis that would
later be taken up by both Japanese and Korean Marxist historians. He claimed
that Korea was still stuck at the stage of the small-scale self-sufficient
‘closed household economy’ (Geschlossene
Hauswirtschaft) with negligible distribution of goods via the market. This
meant that Korea had not yet reached the intermediate economic stage of ‘town
economy’ (Stadtwirtschaft), let alone
the modern stage of ‘national economy’ (Volkswirtschaft).
According to Fukuda this meant that in terms of Japanese history Korea was at a
similar stage to the period before the establishment of the Kamakura Bakufu in
1185. In German terms Korea was at the same stage as high medieval states such
as the Salian Dynasty of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In other words,
Korean development lagged behind Japan and Europe by some seven or eight
hundred years.9
Fukuda, like his German
mentor Bücher, was a devout stagist.10 He believed that to reach the
stage of Volkswirtschaft a society
had to go through the stage of Stadtwirtschaft,
which in Europe and Japan was equated with the feudal political system. This belief then translated into
Fukuda’s central explanation of Korean historical backwardness: the contention
that the country had lacked a feudal stage in its history.11 It was
this stage that had made it possible for countries like Germany and Japan to
achieve modernity, even if they lagged behind some other European countries.
Lack of a feudal stage, according to Fukuda, doomed a country to perpetual
backwardness or the tutelage of a more advanced nation.
In his 1904 article, Fukuda
openly used his theory of Korean stagnation to advocate Japanese domination and
absorption of Korea in an argument reminiscent of the classic justifications of
European imperialism, exemplified in Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”:
We must realise the weight
of the task that faces [the Japanese nation], as it is the natural destiny and
duty of a powerful and superior culture to assimilate [Korea] by sweeping away
the national particularity of this country that has reached the extremes of
corruption and decline and whose people have not experienced feudal education
and the development of their economic units on the basis of that education.12
Later, during the
1920s, the idea that Korea’s backwardness was due to its lack of a feudal stage
was taken up by other Japanese historians such as Kokusho Iwao 黑正巖 (1895-1949) and Shikata Hiroshi 四方博 (1900-1973). By the late 1920s and early
1930s, as I will show in the next section, Fukuda’s theory of Korean stagnation
was being overtaken by the new Marxist historiography that was eagerly adopted
by both Japanese and Korean scholars. But, with a few exceptions, this too
would focus on finding explanations for Korea’s backwardness.
7 Kang Chinch’ŏl,
“ilche kwanhakcha-ga pon Han’guksa-ŭi ‘chŏngch’esŏng’-gwa kŭ iron,” Han’guk sahak 7 (1986): pp. 174-175.
Judged by the standards of today’s understanding of late Chosŏn history
Fukuda’s picture of Korean economy and society is clearly very deficient. one
can only guess that the reasons for this were a lack of serious research
combined with the prejudices that he brought with him from Japan and Germany.
His stagist outlook also leads him to ignore the possibility that what he
observed in Korea in 1902 was actually the result of fairly recent
developments, such as the impact of imperialism and world capitalism since the
1870s and the decline of the Chosŏn state.
8 anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, pp.
462.
9 Kang Chinch’ŏl,
“ilche kwanhakcha-ga pon Han’guksa-ŭi ‘chŏngch’esŏng’-gwa kŭ iron,” p. 170.
10 this is meant in
the sense of someone who believes that there are necessary stages through which
every society must pass in order to progress, as opposed to thinkers like
alexander Gerschenkron and Leon trotsky, who believed that societies could leap
over certain stages, using the ‘advantage of backwardness’ to compress
development into much shorter periods than their forerunners.
11 this theory is
referred to in Korean as ponggŏn chedo kyŏllyŏron
(封建制度缺如論).
12 Fukuda tokuzō,
“Kankoku no keizai soshiki to keizai tani,” quoted in Yi Ch’ŏlsŏng. “shingminji
shgi yŏksa inshik-kwa yŏksa sŏsul,” p. 129.
2] chon
soKtaM and ˘ ˘ thE ‘KorEan Koza-ha’¯
The
Marxist historiography of Paek Nam-un 白南雲
(1894-1979) is now relatively well known, but the same cannot be said for the
other pioneering Korean Marxist historians of the 1930s and 1940s.13
One reason for this may be that among their leading members were those who
advocated a stagnation approach to pre-modern Korea; something that did not sit
well with the Stalinist-nationalist historiography that emerged in North Korea
in the 1950s and in the South in the 1970s and 1980s. Already during the 1930s
prominent Korean Marxists, including Kim Kwang-jin 金洸鎭 (1903-86) and Yi Ch’ŏng-won 李淸源, had fiercely criticized Paek’s “five
stages” approach and advocated the application of the Asiatic mode of
production to Korean history in what might be called the ‘Korean Kōza-ha.’14
In the post-liberation years of the late 1940s another historian, Chŏn Sŏktam,
emerged as the leading ‘stagnationist.’ Before we consider his particular
approach to the issue of stagnation and Korean history, we should first look at
one of the main sources for the ideas of the Korean Marxists of the 1930s and
1940s.
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chŏn sŏktam – Chosŏn kjongjesa
1987
edition cover
official endorsement
of Stalin, but this did not stop those advocating the “two roads” theory
(feudalism in Europe and an Asiatic mode of production in the non-European
world) from continuing the debate well into
the 1930s.15
The background to the Korean
absorption and adaptation of these Japanese and international Marxist debates
on history was, of course, the Japanese colonial annexation of Korea from 1910
to 1945. It is well known that many famous Korean Marxists studied in Japan in
the 1920s and 1930s, but much less known that Japanese Marxists came to Korea.
One such person was the
historian Moriya
Katsumi 森谷克己 (1904-1964), who
went to work at Keijō Imperial University 京城帝國大學
(the predecessor of today’s Seoul National University) in 1927, immediately
after graduating from Tokyō Imperial University 東京帝國大學,
and was made assistant professor there in 1929. In 1933 Moriya published a
volume of articles along with some of his Keijō colleagues, including Shikata
Hiroshi, Takeji Ōuchi 大內武次 and
Pak Mun-gyu 朴文奎16,
entitled Studies on the Socio-economic
History of Chosŏn (Chosen shakai
keizaishi kenkyu 朝鮮社會經濟史硏究).
In the 1920s and 1930s
debates raged among Marxists In his own article “A Study on the Traditional
Agricultural around the world over the applicability of Marx’s schemes Society
of Korea (“Kyū rai no Chōsen nōgyō
shakai ni of historical development to the non-European world and tsuite no
kenkyū no tame ni” 舊來の朝鮮農業社會につい these debates crystallized around two particular positions. ての硏究のために),17 Moriya sets out to
explain Korean Those that advocated the five-stages theory received the
backwardness, examining the ideas of Hegel, Marx and
13 For a thorough
introduction to the work of Paek nam-un in english see: Pang Kie-chung. “Paek
namun and Marxist scholarship during the Colonial Period,” in Landlords, Peasants and Intellectuals in
Modern Korea, edited by Pang Kie-chung and Michael D. shin. Cornell east
asia series, 2005.
14 the Kōza-ha 講座派 or Lectures Faction was one of the two main factions of Japanese
communist thinkers in the 1930s. on the Kōza-ha position on Japanese
development and capitalism see andrew Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan, chapter 3.
15 see Joshua Fogel,
“the Debates over the asiatic Mode of Production in soviet russia, China and
Japan,” American Historical Review
93:1 (February 1988): pp. 56-79.
16 it is interesting
to note that the one Korean contributor to this volume – Pak Mun-gyu – was also
an assistant professor at Keijō imperial University. after liberation in 1945,
he eventually fled north like many other Korean Marxists and became a prominent
political figure under Kim il sung, rising to the post of home affairs minister
in 1962.
17 Moriya Katsumi,
“Kyū rai no Chō sen nō gyō shakai ni tsuite no kenkyū no tame ni,” in Keijō teikoku daigaku hobun gakkai: Chō sen
shakai keizaishi kenkyu (tokyo: tōkō shoin, 1933), pp. 297-520.
Wittfogel along the
way. Four years later, in 1937, Moriya published a detailed study of the
Asiatic mode of production,18 leaving little doubt that he was an
advocate of the “two roads” thesis, as opposed to the then prevailing Stalinist
orthodoxy of the “five stages.”19 Having said this, it seems that he
did not deny the existence of feudalism in Korean history as Fukuda had done,
but rather saw Chosŏn society as a mixture of “immature” feudalism
with a despotic bureaucratic
state.20
Although Chŏn Sŏktam studied
in Japan at Tohoku Imperial University 東北帝國大學
during the late 1930s and only returned to Korea in 1940, it is clear from the
writings he published in the late 1940s that Moriya Katsumi was an important
influence on his historiography.21 In fact, it is probably no
exaggeration to say that the influence of Moriya and other similar Japanese
Marxists helped to form a ‘Korean Kōza-ha’ that became the dominant group of
Marxist historians during the short post-liberation period of 1945-50.22
In a series of books published by Chŏn and his collaborators between 1946 and
1949, these historians emphasized the stagnation of pre-modern Korean history
and attempted to find an
explanation for it.23
In order to give a clearer
idea of the specificities of Chŏn’s stagnation theory, I will briefly examine
some key ideas from an essay contained in his 1949 book Economic history of Korea (Chosŏn
kyŏngjesa 朝鮮經濟史)
that forms part of a substantial critique of Paek Nam-un’s
Stalinist-universalist historiography. In this essay, entitled “The problem of
‘slave society’ as a stage of progression in the development of Korean
society,”24 he takes a rather different approach from Fukuda,
proposing that the main reason for Korean backwardness was not the lack of a
feudal period, but the lack of a slave society in Korean history. Chŏn argued
that although slavery had always been an important form of labour in Korean
history, it had never dominated over serf labour:
It is true that there was
much slavery in the Three Kingdoms period as well as during the United Shilla
and Koryŏ
periods and even through to the Chosŏn
dynasty, and slave labour had considerable significance as one form of labour.
This slave labour not only took the form of domestic slave labour; slaves
played an important role in providing government artisans and were also
employed in cultivating the landholdings of aristocrats and government
officials. However, even in the case of the Three Kingdoms period, where people
have made great efforts at trying to discover a slave-owning social formation,
slave labour was not the dominant form of labour.25
Chŏn actually put
forward three interlinked reasons for Korea’s historical backwardness: first,
the persistence of communal forms of social production such as lineage organizations;
second, the underdevelopment of private land ownership and the dominance of
state land ownership; third, the lack of a slave stage in Korean history. The
significance of the non-development of a slave society was that, unlike in
Greece and Rome, the remnants of the communal mode of production were not
destroyed by the enslavement of a large part of the population and private
property was not stimulated by the use of slave labour on large plantations.
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toriography was quite different from
that of Moriya, who
18
Moriya Katsumi, Ajia teki seisan yoshiki
ron, tō kyō: ikuseisha, 1937.
19
For more on the asiatic
mode-of-production debate in east asia, see Joshua Fogel, “the Debates over
the asiatic Mode of Production.”20 Kang Chinch’ŏl, “ilche kwanhakcha-ga pon
Han’guksa-ŭi ‘chŏngch’esŏng’-gwa kŭ iron,” p. 215.
21
the details of Chŏn’s life are not
entirely clear, but more biographical information can be found in im Yŏngt’ae.
“Puk-ŭro kan Malksŭjuŭi yŏksa hakcha-wa sahoe kyŏngje hakcha tŭl,” Yŏksa pipyŏng 8 (1989): pp. 300-337.
22
For more on these ‘mainstream’ Marxist
historians, see Yi Hwanbyŏng. “Haebang chikhu Malksŭjuŭi yŏksa hakcha tŭr-ŭi
Han'guksa inshik,” Han’guk sahaksa
hakpo 5 (March 2002): pp. 41-88.
23
h e main books published by Chŏn during
this period were Chŏn sŏktam et al., Yijo
saehoe kyŏngjesa, (seoul: nonongsa, 1946); Chosŏnsa kyojŏng (seoul: Uryu munhwasa, 1948); and Chosŏn kyŏngjesa (seoul: Pangmun
ch’ulp’ansa, 1949).
24 Chŏn sŏktam,
“Chosŏn sahoe paljŏn-ŭi nujinjŏk tan’gye rosŏ-ŭi ‘noye sahoe’-ŭi munje,” in Chosŏn kyŏngjesa, pp. 20-30.
25
Chŏn sŏktam, Chosŏn kyŏngjesa, p. 22. 26 ibid.,
p. 29.
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At the beginning of the
essay Chŏn refuses to be drawn into a discussion of the applicability of the
Asiatic mode of production to Korean history. However, in the ensuing
discussion of slave societies, it is clear that Chŏn had absorbed, almost
certainly from Moriya Katsumi, many of the elements that theorists of the
Asiatic mode of production emphasized, such as the persistence of communal
social relations. Chŏn’s views of feudalism in Korean history also bear some
resemblance to those of Moriya, since he argues that Korean feudalism had ‘Asian’
characteristics.26 However, the political significance of Chŏn’s
his-
by the early 1940s had become an apologist
for Japanese imperialism in East Asia under the guise of the Greater East Asia
Co-prosperity Sphere and the struggle against Western imperialism.27
Chŏn Sŏktam on the other hand remained a socialist and his understanding of
Korea’s historical backwardness did not lead him to pessimistic conclusions
about the country’s future. Rather, following Lenin and Trotsky’s vision of
Russia, Chŏn saw Korean backwardness as a call to arms and an opportunity to
achieve rapid social change, as the following two quotations demonstrate:
[B]y fully assessing the
stagnancy of the Korean process of social development that is manifested in the
underdevelopment of slave relations, we today can feel all the more acutely and
urgently the necessity of the social historical revolution that faces us.28
If we purge all these feudal
elements and achieve [...] a bourgeois revolution, we will not need to pass
through two or three hundred years of bourgeois society like Britain or France
but will be able to move to a newer society immediately afterwards.29
Not long after writing this,
sometime around 1950, Chŏn fled to North Korea where he became an important
academic, teaching at both Kim Il Sung University 金日成大學 and the Institute of Social Sciences 社會科學院. However, it was not his ‘stagnationist’
view of Korean history that became the North Korean orthodoxy, but something
much more akin to Paek Nam-un’s application of the five-stages theory. This
emerging North Korean orthodoxy, along with its corollary in a theory of
internal development that effectively tried to erase the idea of backwardness
from Korean history, would later have a profound influence on South Korean historiography
too.
-------
3] rhEE younghoon and thE nEW
rIght
From the 1980s,
various forms of internal-development theory became dominant in South Korean
historical scholarship on pre-modern Korea. While these new theories may have
been willing to recognize certain particularities of Korean historical
development, they have rested on two key assertions that are expressly aimed at
overturning stagnation theories: the existence of a Korean feudal period and
the endogenous development of capitalist relations of production during the
latter part of that period, usually referred
to as “capitalist sprouts.”
Today, however, there are also heirs to the tradition of stagnation
theory among the historians associated with South Korea’s self-proclaimed New
Right. Perhaps the most prominent of them is the Seoul National University
economic historian Rhee Younghoon (Yi Yŏnghun), who has taken a leading role in
the development of the relatively new field of quantitative economic history.
His understanding of Korean history is certainly not the same as that of Fukuda
or Chŏn, as it reflects decades of further research, important new empirical
findings and, of course, the very different political and historical context of
early twenty-first-century South Korea. As we will see, his understanding of
the late Chosŏn period is more subtle than that of his predecessors and it is
debatable whether it can simply be called a ‘stagnation approach.’ However, I think Rhee’s theories have
enough elements in common with those of earlier scholars for him to be seen as
part of the same tradition in a broad sense.
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27
Kang Chinch’ŏl, “ilche
kwanhakcha-ga pon Han’guksa-ŭi ‘chŏngch’esŏng’-gwa kŭ iron,” p. 217-218.
28
Chŏn sŏktam, Chosŏn kyŏngjesa, p. 30.
29
Chŏn sŏktam, Chosŏnsa kyojŏng,
pp. 6-7, cited in Yi Hwanbyŏng, “Haebang chikhu Malksŭjuŭi yŏksa hakcha tŭr-ŭi
Han’guksa inshik,” p. 48 30 Yi Yŏnghun, Chosŏn
hugi sahoe kyŏngjesa (seoul: Han’gilsa, 1988).
31 “Chosŏn sahoe kusŏng ŭi yŏksajŏk sŏnggyŏk e kwanhan
koch’al” and “Chosŏn ponggŏn chedo ŭi pip’anjŏk kŏmt’o,” in Yi Yŏnghun, Chosŏn hugi sahoe kyŏngjesa, pp.
599-628.
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In his 1988 book Socio-economic History of the Late Chosŏn
Period (Chosŏn hugi sahoe kyŏngjesa 朝鮮後期社會經濟史),30 which was based on his
PhD thesis of three years earlier, Rhee attempted a Marxist analysis of late
Chosŏn economy and landholding. This Marxist analysis was rather different from
the Stalinist five-stages theory that dominated Marxist historiography in North
and South Korea by the 1980s. Instead, it was based on Nakamura Satoru 中村哲 and Miyajima Hiroshi’s 宮嶋博史 reinterpretation of Marx.
As he outlined in two appendices entitled “An investigation into the historical
character of the Chosŏn social formation” and “A critical examination of the
Chosŏn feudal system,”31 Rhee explicitly rejected feudalism as a
label for pre-modern Korean society and advocated a form of the two-roads
theory. In these appendices he stresses the particularity of European feudalism
as the dynamic system that gave rise to capitalism and notes that “this sort of
feudal system did not exist in any non-European society, including Chosŏn.”32
In fact, he writes, “there is a gap between any form of Marx’s feudal mode of
production and the reality of Chosŏn society.”33 Instead, he adopts Miyajima’s
periodization of Korean history into three phases of the Asiatic mode of
production, with Chosŏn corresponding to the third phase.34
Therefore Rhee’s early understanding of Korean history, although not focusing
explicitly on Korea’s backwardness, has some elements in common with earlier
theories of stagnation, such as the denial of Korean feudalism and the idea that pre-modern Korea
could not have achieved capitalism independently through internal development.
More recently, Rhee has been
one of the leading members of the Naksŏngdae Economic Research Institute 落星臺經濟硏究所 and the editor of a series of volumes
bringing together new quantitative research on the late Chosŏn period. The most
wellknown of these is Re-examining the
Late Chosŏn Period Through Quantitative Economic History (Suryang kyŏngjesa ro tasi pon Chosŏn hugi 수 량경제사로 다시 본 조선후기).35
In the final chapter of this book Rhee gives an overview and interpretation of
the latest research on late Chosŏn economic history. Although his
interpretation is based on recent empirical findings, many of which have
demonstrated considerable commercialization of the Korean economy during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it still shares some of the same basic
ideas concerning late Chosŏn that Rhee developed in the 1980s.
Rhee
breaks down the results of recent research by himself and his colleagues into
three key findings. First, in the late Chosŏn period the non-market economy
based on self-sufficiency and redistribution still made up a considerable
proportion of the overall Korean economy. Second, from the second half of the
seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth century Chosŏn experienced
slow growth and general economic stability. Third, from the early nineteenth
century both the Chosŏn
new right
textbook
32 Yi Yŏnghun,
Chosŏn hugi sahoe kyŏngjesa, p. 627.
33 ibid., p. 590.
34 ibid., pp. 576-578.
population and its market began to stagnate
or decline, leading to a full-scale economic crisis in the latter half of the
century.36 Rhee particularly emphasizes the role of the Chosŏn
state’s redistributive activities, mainly in the form of the grain-loan system,
in stabilizing the economy, and speculates that the decline of this system was
one of the triggers for the general economic decline of the nineteenth century.
He even argues that the
scale of the Chosŏn state’s redistributive system – which he terms a “moral
economy” – was quite unusual in world historical terms.37
This is, therefore, a much
more nuanced view of the economic history of late Chosŏn than earlier
stagnation theories would have allowed for, but its conclusion is essentially the same as those of Fukuda
and Chŏn: nineteenth-century Korea was backward and could not develop without
an outside shock, or more bluntly, without colonization by a more advanced
nation. Hence the final point stressed by Rhee in this chapter is that modern economic growth in Korea only
began in the twentieth century during the Japanese colonial period. In
addition, it was this colonial development of infrastructure, along with labour
and credit markets, that “laid
the basis for the
development of the Korean market economy and industrial society.”38
Here, then, we can glimpse the political subtext of Rhee’s historiography,
which is made far more explicit by the New Right organisation and the Textbook
Forum.
It is not my intention here to provide an analysis of the
historiography of the New Right’s recently published Alternative Textbook for Korean Modern History (Taean kyogwasŏ: Han’guk kŭn-hyŏndaesa 대안과서: 한국 근-현 대사), but since Rhee was one of the
leading lights behind this enterprise, it will be worthwhile to point out some
of the connections between his view of Korean history
35 Yi Yŏnghun
(ed.), Suryang kyŏngjesa ro tasi pon Chosŏn
hugi (seoul: snU Press, 2004).
36 Yi Yŏnghun,
“Chosŏn hugi kyŏngjesa-ŭi saeroun tonghyang-gwa kwaje”, p. 372.
37 ibid.,
p. 378.
38 ibid.,
p. 389.
and the aims of the textbook, as outlined on
the Textbook Forum website.39
The general narrative of
this new ‘alternative’ textbook is very much in keeping with Rhee’s emphasis on
the lack of development prior to colonialism. One of the pertinent features of the book is its
generally negative view of Korean political developments in the period between
port opening (1876) and the protectorate treaty with Japan (1905), designating
the Tonghak peasant rebellion 東學農民運動 (1894) as a “conservative royalist” movement, and the
Taehan Empire 大韓帝國 (1897-1910) as a pre-modern state.
This lays the ground for a relatively positive appraisal of Japanese
colonialism as a period that saw both colonial exploitation and significant economic development. In
fact, the textbook goes as far as to argue that colonial rule also helped to
develop the “social capacity” that Koreans needed to establish a modern nation
state. Finally, the textbook strongly emphasizes
the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea and its market economy, which was
essentially created by Park Chunghee’s 朴正熙
“modernizing revolution” on the basis of earlier colonial and postcolonial
development.40
Despite obvious theoretical
differences, the historical scholarship of Rhee Younghoon and the overtly
ideological campaign of the New Right can be seen as the heirs of earlier
stagnation theories of Korean historical development. What is most important to
note, though, is the specific political motivations of the New Right and the
contemporary context in which they have set out their historiographical stall.
This scholarship has emerged during a period in which left-nationalist
historiography arguably retains its dominance in mainstream South Korean
academia, but has come under repeated attack from postmodernists, postnationalists
and those advocating other new trends in academia since the mid to late 1990s.
The academics associated with the New Right, a number of whom are former
Marxists themselves, appear keen to remove the influence of Stalinist or
left-nationalist history once and for all as part of a more general programme
of reviving the ideological strength of the Right in Korea. Overturning the
left-nationalists’ internal-development theory and returning to a form of
stagnation theory, however nuanced, is one of their primary goals. This in
itself, however, is only part of a broader historical programme that seeks to
firmly establish the legitimacy of the South Korean state (as opposed to a
wider ‘unification nationalism’); give a positive spin to the dictatorship of Park
Chung-hee; and promote the modern market economy as the highest form of human
civilization. It is, in effect, a form of neoliberal historiography that seeks
to ‘re-evaluate’ imperialism and authoritarianism in order to reinvigorate the
fortunes of the South Korean Right.
4] concLusIon
The concept of
stagnation should properly be understood as representing a spectrum of ideas,
from the most prejudiced Orientalism of Enlightenment Europe, which emphasized
the inability of ‘Asiatic’ peoples to develop, to the much more narrow and ‘scientific’ application of
economic theories that attempt to understand the lack of internal
development toward capitalism in parts of the world. The thinkers that have been examined in this article
fall much closer to the latter end of the spectrum. They were not simply
ideologues, and their various historiographies should be understood as serious
approaches to the Korean past, however flawed. Above all, these historians were
faced with the fact that Korea had not developed in the same manner as European
countries, or even in a manner similar to Japan, and had, at the turn of the
century, lacked the political or economic power to resist colonialism. In their
attempts to explain Korea’s particular path to capitalist modernity, historians
of Korea therefore repeatedly returned to some form of stagnation theory. On
the one hand, this reflects a perceived need to fit Korean history into some
form of linear historical scheme, most often based on one drawn from European
history. On the other hand, it also reflects a long-standing tradition of
excluding Asian and other non-European countries from any such ‘universal’
scheme, giving them a separate developmental path, or paths. Above all, it
reveals a deeper desire to ‘normalize’ Korea and set it on the path of
progress, whether through colonial tutelage, socialist progress or neoliberal
capitalism.
|
39
textbook Forum, “Ch’ongsŏ 4 – Han’guk kŭnhyŏndaesa
taean kyogwasŏ.” (published 24/3/2008) see
http://www.textforum.net/bbs/board_view.php?bbs_ code=util_bbs6&bbs_number=4&page=1
(accessed 30/8/2009).
40
textbook Forum, “Ch’ongsŏ 4 – Han’guk kŭnhyŏndaesa
taean kyogwasŏ.”
|
As stated in the
introduction, a more nuanced approach to stagnation theory is required: one
that is able to recognize its multiple forms and the variety of motives that
drove its advocates. Above
all, the varieties of stagnation theory outlined above should be understood in
their specific political and social contexts. Thus, for Fukuda Tokuzō Korea’s
backwardness was a clear justification for the encroachment of Japanese
imperialism and
ultimately the modernization of Korea under colonial rule. His view that Korea
had lacked the necessary preparatory stage for capitalist modernity – feudalism
– therefore became a keystone of the colonial government’s ideology.
Conversely, Chŏn Sŏktam,
as a socialist, saw Korea’s backwardness as a spur to revolutionary transformation
and not as an obstacle to independent development. For him, it seems that there
was no sense of shame or inadequacy in recognizing that Korea’s historical
development had lagged behind that of Europe or Japan, just a sense of urgency
concerning the need to catch up, something that would ultimately be possible only through socialism.
Finally, when we turn to Rhee
Younghoon we find a third and rather different political motivation for
seeing Korea’s past as relatively backward. In Rhee’s case the inability of
Chosŏn Korea to develop toward modernity internally reconfirms the origins of
Korean modernity in the Japanese colonial period and helps to establish the
legitimacy of subsequent South Korean governments that he sees as the
inheritors of that colonial modernity. We could also add here that Rhee’s disavowal of any form of
Marxist approach to history aids his elevation of the market economy to the
apex of human civilization by denying the possibility of a
postcapitalist horizon.
The concept of stagnation
itself is neither exclusively reactionary nor progressive; neither pessimistic
nor revolutionary; and neither apologist nor anti-imperialist. Rather, the
concept can have all of these different political meanings, depending on the
context in which it is deployed. The formula applied by nationalist historians in South Korea – that
stagnation theory equals imperial ideology – is too simplistic. The
internal-development theory championed by nationalist historians since the
1970s in South Korea (and even earlier in the North) as the answer to
stagnation theory has many empirical and theoretical problems of its own.41
But perhaps more significantly, it can be just as easily implicated in the
politics of modernization and appropriated as a prop for the developmentalist
states of both Koreas.
The dichotomies of
stagnation/progress and internal development/colonial modernity should not be
the only options open to historians studying Korea and East Asia. Each side in
this intractable debate has its flaws and the impasse can only be resolved with
an approach that departs from both. Such an approach could seek to construct a
universalist and non-Eurocentric history of East Asia, and, by necessity, the
rest of the world .42
5] rEFErEncEs
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42 this is something
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___. “Chosŏn hugi kyŏngjesa ŭi saeroun tonghyang-gwa kwaje” [New directions and problems in the eco-
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